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The-Sense-of-Being-Stared-At

The "Sense of Being Stared At" Does Not Depend On Known Sensory Clues by Rupert Sheldrake Biology Forum 93: 209-224 (2000)

  • 1. Simple Experiments Show That People Can Tell When they are Being Stared At from Behind.
  • 2. Subjects are Looked At through Windows
  • 3. Subjects Guess Better when Looked At Than In Control Trials
  • 4. Factors Affecting Subjects' Scores
  • 5. Confirmation from Experiments Using Closed Circuit Television

1. SIMPLE EXPERIMENTS SHOW THAT PEOPLE CAN TELL WHEN THEY ARE BEING STARED AT FROM BEHIND

Many people have had the experience of turning round with the feeling that someone is looking at them from behind, to find that this is in fact the case. Surveys show that between 70 and 97% of the population in Europe and North America have had personal experience of this phenomenon (Braud, Shafer and Andrews [1990]; Sheldrake [1994]; Cottrell, Winer and Smith [1996]).

I have developed a simple experimental procedure to test whether people really can tell when they are being looked at from behind (Sheldrake [1994], [1998], [1999]). Participants work in pairs, with the looker sitting behind the subject. In a randomized series of trials, the looker either looks at the back of the subject's neck, or looks away and thinks of something else.

The results are repeatable, consistent and positive. More than 15,000 trials have already been conducted, involving more than 700 subjects (Sheldrake [1999]) Overall, there was an extremely significant positive effect (p< 1x10-15), indicating that people really can tell when they are being looked at from behind.

The data revealed a characteristic pattern whereby the scores in the 'looking' trials were very significantly above the chance level, whereas in the control 'not-looking' trials the scores were not significantly different from chance (Sheldrake [1999]).

This pattern of results makes sense if the sense of being stared at is a real phenomenon. It would be expected to work when people were actually being stared at, as they were in the looking trials. By contrast, in the control trials when they were not being looked at, subjects were being asked to try and detect the absence of an effect, which has no parallel in real-life situations; and under these conditions the results were close to chance levels. They were just guessing.

If subjects were cheating or receiving subtle sensory cues then they would have been expected to obtain positive scores in both the looking and the not-looking trials. But this is not what happened. The pattern of results does not support the idea that they depended on cheating or subtle sensory clues (Sheldrake [1998, 1999]).